Connie Sieh <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>On Mon, 22 May 2006, Dushan Mitrovich wrote:
>
>> Recently I'd finally managed, with helpful suggestions from some list
>> readers here, to install SL 4.2 on my system.  A main source of diffi-
>> culty had been that system-config-display was messing up the display and
>> video adapter information and insisting on writing that mis-information
>> to xorg.conf.  After that was finally cleared up by modifying xorg.conf
>> manually, a remaining problem was the lower quarter of the screen seemed
>> to lose its sync (not always the whole width of the screen, often just
>> the part of a window there).
>>
>> The problem wasn't the requested resolution, 1280x960 by 16 bits, since
>> a higher resolution, 1600x1200 by 16 bits, worked fine.  I suspected the
>> video driver.
>>
>> Since my OS/2 system worked well with the desired resolution using the
>> SNAP driver that came with eCS, I decided to try out the linux version
>> of SNAP to see if that solved the problem.  It installed painlessly, and
>> would no doubt have immediately fixed the screen if system-config-display
>> didn't again barge in and screw up xorg.conf by up-dating the correct
>> version written by SNAP.  After fixing this by reverting to the SNAP ver-
>> sion of xorg.conf, the screen has behaved as it is supposed to.
>>
>> On the way to this fix, after SNAP was installed and I was re-booting,
>> Kudzu showed up to probe for new hardware.  Then an information screen
>> came up, after which a second screen informed me that it was removing the
>> Permedia2 video adapter, which is what my system has.  There were three
>> option boxes: Remove Configuration, Keep Configuration, and Do Nothing
>> (this is from memory and the wording may be off).  After just 3 or 4 se-
>> conds, before I could read all the info in that window and decide what
>> I should do, and without pressing Enter, the screen went black and was
>> replaced by a mottled one that claimed, in big letters, INVALID SCAN FRE-
>> QUENCY.  This happened at each of several re-bootings, until I finally
>> read enough of that window to be prepared to make a quick choice to Keep
>> Configuration.  After that the system booted to 640x480 or 800x600 (not
>> sure which), and I could replace the incorrect xorg.conf with the one
>> prerpared by SNAP.  A further reboot finally produced the fixed 1280x960
>> resolution.
>>
>> My impression is that the display/driver parts of the SL 4.2 system have
>> some serious deficiencies that should be addressed.  Is this something
>> that RedHat was responsible for, or have they been modified by the SL
>> group?
>
> We try really hard to NOT modify the parts that RedHat provides.  No we
> have not modified it.  Note that if we had modified it there would have
> been documentation about it in the SL.releasenote .

Okay, thanks, that's good to learn.  I'll try to let RedHat know about my
experiences, if I can figure out the right channel.

- Dushan